Friday, 10 June 2016

A few
years ago, artist David Gledhill
was given an album of photographs that had been found in a fleamarket in
Frankfurt. The album dated from the 1950s and had been put together in East
Germany by a GP, Dr Wilhelm Munscheid, as a fifth-wedding-anniversary present
for his daughter Renate. Renate had married a West German, becoming Frau
Manjock, and as a result lived in the West, though she was able to visit her
parents quite often. But for some reason she did not receive the album intended
for her.

An important
aspect of David Gledhill's practice is painting from photographs, particularly
found images. He has produced a series of 30 paintings based on photos in the
album. Later, he discovered that Frau Manjock was living near Frankfurt and he
went to meet her and to give her the album that was intended for her. He has
made an interesting film (available to view
on YouTube) about this experience.

Now
the novelist Nicholas Royle has
collaborated with David to write a novella, In Camera, sparked by David's paintings (and illustrated by them). This adds a
further intriguing layer of fiction which conjures a new world out of the
album. The interplay between this imagined context and the historical context
is very rich.

As I'm
so interested in painting that takes photographs as its subject, I've been
really enjoying an email conversation I've been having with David Gledhill
about the project.

Jane Housham (JH):When your subject is 'in' a photo, how
important is it to you to reproduce the same qualities of dark and light as the
original photo? When you paint a
picture derived from a black-and-white or sepia photograph, do you use a single
colour and let the white come from the background or do you use one colour plus
white or even several different colours?

David Gledhill
(DG): With
the work based on black and white photographs, I just use black oil paint and
remove the paint with rags and cotton buds to allow the primed surface of the
canvas to show through. I go on applying further washes of black paint and then
removing it again until the image is complete. Towards the end of the process I
tend to scumble dry paint broadly across the forms to deepen the tonal
contrast. After a few weeks I then apply a glaze layer with a tiny amount of
raw umber paint in it. This acts to warm up the image and to pull it together
and set it back behind a slight sheen on the surface of the canvas. Raw umber can
approximate to the sepia hue of some old photographs so it has to be managed
carefully so as to avoid too overt a sense of nostalgia, which isn’t really the
point of the work.

JH: That's very interesting. Does the desire to 'seal' the painting behind
that sheen bear any relation to wanting to reproduce the sheen of a photo?

DG: Yes, it opens up a
space behind the surface of the canvas which has a similar feel to the space of
a photograph. Of course it’s hard to make the canvas completely ‘transparent’
as it were and I’m conscious of a century’s worth of art theory that has
privileged the picture plane over the content of a painting.

Having said that, there are all sorts of
little imperfections in a painting that remind you of its materiality and this
is another significant distinction between paintings and photographs. I don’t
think most people would be preoccupied with reading photographs in terms of
their materiality rather than what they’re of, other than being conscious of
the means of viewing, such as a print, an album or a computer screen. But when
you see a painting you’re highly conscious of this object in the room, that’s
like a piece of furniture rather than simply an image.

The work isn't photorealist in the
traditional sense of the term as I'm not trying to reproduce the specific
quality of reflected light as recorded by a camera lens. The tonal range of the
original snap is the point of departure but the finished paintings have much
stronger contrasts of light and dark. This is because I'm attempting to use techniques
and conventions from the history of drawing and painting to translate a
photographic image into a painterly equivalent that also suggests the tactile
forms beneath the record of reflected light.

JH: Your mention of 'imperfections' in paintings has just made me think of
some of Peter Doig's large-scale works from the Nineties, which are clearly
derived from film stills or photos but in which he has absolutely spattered the
surface of the canvas with drops and smears of paint so that there's an extreme
pull between those two elements – the painting as mimesis and as surface
decoration or mark-making. But that same tension is there in this series too,
as you say.

DG: With this work, I
wanted to move the balance between the painting as object and as image towards
a position where it’s inviting to enter into the atmospherics of the painting,
but also evident that it has some material similarities with photography.
Wiping the paint back to allow the primed canvas to show through, produces a
similar effect to the printing of black and white photographs in that the
lighter areas of the composition come from the support.

David Gledhill, 'Dielenaufgang'. Oil on canvas, 92 x 138cm, 2010

JH: How do you feel about the process of choosing images to paint when you
have decided not to select a composition from the infinite possibilities of
unmediated reality but, rather, to choose from views that have already been
mediated by someone else?

DG: I
worked directly from the motif for many years. When I was studying in the late
70’s, I reacted to the conceptualised tendencies in the art of the time and
went back to Cézanne. I wanted to work my way through the various modernist
approaches and started by drawing and painting in the landscape. Of course, I ended
up resorting to methods and conventions that I had seen in the work of other
artists. I tried very hard to make work in response to my own perception and
situatedness in a particular place, but as time went on the constant
interruptions or bad weather conditions discouraged me from painting outdoors,
so I made working drawings on the spot and developed them in the studio. These
days I would take issue with the idea of the experience of nature as an
'unmediated' one. It seems to me that experience and sense perception are
already mediated, not just in the strictly physiological sense but also in
terms of how we create meaning from what we experience, which is a social and
cultural process. I'm compelled by this process of making meaning, so the
intention and the decision to take a photograph are what interests me, rather
than questions of the objectivity or truth value of the photograph itself.

JH: So is the key element of the choice of a 'found' photo as your subject
the composition within the frame of the photo?

DG: Yes, exactly. I
look for a composition I can lift out of the photograph and render in painterly
terms. If I see a painting by one of my favourite artists that I’ve never seen
before, the unexpectedness of the composition has the shock value and
disorientating effect of discovering a new species, or a new set of unforeseen
possibilities. It’s something I’ve never been able to verbalise but
occasionally I get the same feeling from a second-hand photograph in a box
somewhere. It’s a completely new way of seeing the world and then the job is to
work out whether the newness of the photograph will translate into painting.
Working from entire albums is less to do with the quirkiness of the individual
compositions and more to do with reaching beyond my preferences and challenging
myself to invest in someone else’s habitual manner of framing their own
experience. The reason why I stopped working from my own photographs was that I
gradually stopped challenging myself to try new subjects in new ways and
working with an album makes you do that.

JH:Is it more challenging when you don't just
select images one by one but, as with the Dr Munscheid photos, accept a set of images as your subject?

DG: I've made
paintings from individual second-hand photographs but when I was given the
album, I thought it was important to attempt as many of the images as possible,
and managed to produce 30 from a total of 57. I've been frustrated with what
you could call the 'commodity status' of paintings for years. When I invite
friends to exhibitions they say "but I can't afford your work". All I
want is for people to see them and if they're interested, to think about them.
I realised that working in series can divert attention from this idea of the
saleability of paintings as individual artefacts. More importantly it also
enables the construction of meaning from the interplay of the paintings amongst
themselves and between the paintings and the source photographs in their album
context. It's inevitably more challenging to work this way partly because each
project takes several years to complete.

JH:Would
you agree that it involves a certain degree of 'submission' to someone else's
choice of moment, of frame? For me, if I'm looking for an image to paint, I
will either search for a long time for an image I want to paint (for instance
spending hours in second-hand shops going through boxes of old photos and only
finding maybe one or two I like) or, alternatively, I'll see an image in a
newspaper or somewhere and it'll speak to me -- I'll know instantly that I want
to turn it into a painting, but that means it has some very special quality
about it. So what it comes down to (for me) is that I don't want to paint just
any old found image, and that's why I wondered whether it was more of a
challenge to attempt to paint all
the images in Dr Munscheid's album, since
I thought there must inevitably have been some images that didn't speak to you
as strongly. You ended up painting just over half, which is a great
achievement, I think. Perhaps 'submitting to the album', as it were, served to
intensify the sense of 'strangeness' one gets from painting a found image,
which I think is caused by so many of the decisions one would have to make if
painting a subject 'in the world' already having been made for one.

DG: I know what you
mean but I wouldn’t choose the word ‘submission’. I think I must have
overdeveloped empathetic faculties, because I’m absolutely enchanted by the
idea of entering into somebody else’s world. I’ve also been fascinated by the
less appealing works of those artists I admire and this is across all media,
including pop music, literature etc. There are the things you adore and can’t
get enough of. You read them or listen to them over and over and then after
years of pleasing yourself in this way you become curious about the less
immediately appealing stuff. In order to maintain and expand the range of what
you can do as an artist, I think you have to try harder with things you don’t
like at first. Teaching art has encouraged me to go to exhibitions I wouldn’t
normally bother with and I’ve learned far more than I could have by sticking to
Rubens, Rembrandt and Titian, whom I’m in awe of. So it’s a case of being aware
that I need to tackle compositions that are less ‘catchy’ in a way, and those
often turn out to be the best ones. This is definitely something that working
with old photographs can help with because whilst early photographs were often
formulaic, since about the 1930’s people all over the world have been pointing
cameras at all kinds of things in all kinds of ways.

I knew why I took the shots I used as
source material to make paintings when I started to work from my own
photographs, but I was curious to explore other people's motivations. Of course
this is only conjecture, but it seemed to me that the Doctor who recorded the
family home as a memento for his daughter was trying to stop time and to
preserve something that was slipping away. What made the album so powerful for
me, was that with the passage to communist rule, the past must have seemed
irretrievable in both a personal but also a larger social sense.

One of the mistakes I made early in the
project was to assume that the Doctor’s personal transition from Nazi to
Communist East Germany somehow made him guilty. Renate showed me a framed
photograph of her father in Sweden during the war, dressed in an officer’s
uniform. Apparently, thousands of small town doctors fled to the West before
1961 and the closure of the borders, in search of the material basics of life;
their own flat and car, television etc. It was clear from the album (and the
paintings) that Doctor Munscheid had a big house, a maid and chauffeur, so he
must have adapted pretty quickly to the new regime. That fascinates me and it’s
there to be read from the photographs and hopefully the paintings. It’s this
possibility that snapshots can contribute to the development of a new form of
history painting that motivates me to keep searching for material to work with.

JH:Is
it possible to see the Dr Munscheid paintings in the flesh anywhere?

DG: I had a few shows
of the paintings when I finished the series back in 2013 but not since then.
I'm hoping that if the book generates some interest, I'll be able to exhibit
the paintings outside the North West. I would love to exhibit them as a series
in the town they document.

JH: That would be excellent.Do you have any feelings about
their needing to be kept together as the originals were?

DG: I've sold two or
three of the paintings from exhibitions and, in those cases, I've painted
replacements so that the series is kept intact.

JH:Do you think you'll carry on replacing
bought paintings in that way? What will it mean when you no longer feel the
need to fill gaps in the series?

DG: I’ve produced a
number of other series since the Dr Munscheid paintings, so perhaps there’s a
time limit on the will to maintain the integrity of a body of work. If I was in
a position where there was interest in the work, I would rather offer it to a
public collection for a drastically reduced price than see it sold off bit by
bit.

JH:Are there any photos in the album that you didn't make paintings of? What were the reasons
for leaving those out, if you did?

There
were quite a few out of focus snaps of dachshunds playing in a garden, which
may have taxed my commitment to the project, so I didn't bother with them.
There are three paintings of dogs in the series however, so they are
represented!

David Gledhill, 'Stuzzi'. Oil on canvas, 38 x 56cm, 2008-2010

JH:Is there a limit to how long you can
concentrate on a single subject, even if it consists of multiple individual
images?

I
wanted to minimise my own intervention in the album's narrative by painting as
many of the photographs as possible, but I think self-imposed strictures
of this kind should occasionally be sidestepped to keep things fresh. I wasn't
aware of any other artists who have used entire photograph albums in this way,
so I was determined to do my best, but I think eventually you can run out of
steam.

JH: Do you like Richter's photo-derived paintings? I mean those of his
paintings that are akin to your Dr Munscheid series, clearly based on photos. I
love them.

DG: I think Richter’s
Baader Meinhof series are easily the best paintings produced by anyone in the
last 40 years and for lots of reasons other than the technical quality of the
individual paintings. His use of the serial form is genuinely innovative and
the engagement with historical events and particularly events of such traumatic
impact was completely groundbreaking. I often wonder why he seems to have
backed away from the possibilities opened up by these paintings. Of course he
has had to endure the volcanic political life of Germany first hand, whilst my
interest is from a safe distance as it were.

JH:Yes, I think those paintings are
extraordinary too. When Tate Modern had their big Richter retrospective a
couple of years ago, I spent ages just sitting in the relatively small room
where that sequence was hung. The imaginative engagement with those dark events
was incredible. I agree that he seems to have retreated to some extent now.

DG: Perhaps the
abstracts sell better!

JH:Did you feel any pangs at parting with the
album when you returned it?

DG: The experience of
meeting Renate and reuniting her with the album was incredibly powerful. For
the first time I felt that painting could be a significant social activity with
some kind of direct connection to lived experience. I think previously I had
bought into the idea of art as a process of self-realisation, but with
this body of work I had attempted to understand someone else's circumstances.

JH:I imagine it must have felt very strange to
have owned the album for quite some time, to have painted versions of the
images in it, and then, later, to reconnect those images with the reality of
Frau Manjock in her retirement home. For me, one particularly powerful moment
of your film was early on [it's at 1 min 44 secs or so], when you're just about to meet her and the automatic glass door opens
to admit you. For me, that's the invisible barrier between your
painted/constructed version of Renate's world and her actual world – you cross
over, and then the rest of the film is about real Renate.

DG: The visit was an
almost hallucinatory experience for me because many of the pieces of furniture
and even the light fixture that you see in the film, I had spent months
meticulously painting from the interior shots of her father’s house. I felt as
though I had grown up in that house myself and here I was in the flat
confronted with objects I knew intimately.

JH: Oh yes, it must have been quite surreal! It makes me think of my
obsession with 'visiting' places via Google Streetview. Sometimes I've explored
them so thoroughly on my computer screen that when I actually go there in
reality, there's very little sense of surprise. But the circumstances here must
have been a hundred times more intense than that.

When
it came to collaborating with Nicholas (Royle), what were your feelings about
the album and your paintings becoming the subject of someone else's creative
process? Was there any sense of tension or reluctance?

DH: Absolutely no
reluctance at all. I was delighted that Nick was interested enough to
collaborate. There are key differences between Nick’s narrative and what I know
about Renate’s childhood, such as the fact that she was an only child, whereas
there’s a brother in the book. What really moves me about the story is the
relationship between the Doctor and his daughter, which culminates in an
incredibly tender and moving scene. I have a daughter myself so I suppose I’m
susceptible to the subject, but it suggests that mixture of exasperation and
love that parenthood brings, whilst also evoking the imaginative world of
childhood during a time of comparative austerity when domestic objects had an
immediacy and fascination. It also deals with the enduring mystery of
photography as something that happens between people, something that I obviously
enjoy thinking about!

JH: I think that would be the perfect note on which to draw this
conversation to an end. It's been so interesting for me to discuss your
wonderful paintings with you. Everything about the project interests me, and I
do hope that very many people buy the book and experience the pleasure of
experiencing all the layers it contains.